Cornell Law Review Volume 87 Article 3 Issue 6 September 2002 A Social History of Everyday Practice: Sadie T.M. Alexander and the Incorporation of Black Women into the American Legal Profession, 1925-1960 Kenneth Walter Mack Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/clr Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Kenneth Walter Mack, A Social History of Everyday Practice: Sadie T.M. Alexander and the Incorporation of Black Women into the American Legal Profession, 1925-1960, 87 Cornell L. Rev. 1405 (2002) Available at: http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/clr/vol87/iss6/3 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at Scholarship@Cornell Law: A Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Cornell Law Review by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Cornell Law: A Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. A SOCIAL HISTORY OF EVERYDAY PRACTICE: SADIE T.M. ALEXANDER AND THE INCORPORATION OF BLACK WOMEN INTO THE AMERICAN LEGAL PROFESSION, 1925-1960 Kenneth Walter Mackt This Article presents a humanist social history of the everyday profes- sional lives of Sadie T.M Alexander and her peers at the early twentieth- century black women's bar, contending that a finely-detailed analysis of quo- tidian law practice reveals the methodological limitations of the reigning in- terpretations of the history of the American bar during this period. Alexander and her peers' professional lives were hemmed in by race- and gender-based structuralfeatures of the bar, as the received interpretationsof the period would predict, but those professional lives were also shaped by an under-theorized social milieu of race and classformation, gender role contes- tation, lawyer-client conflict, and day-to-day professional relationships. That social milieu would provide Alexander and her peers with tools that would enable them to obtain a surprising,and often ironic, degree of power and prestige in the profession-surprising,at least, from the perspective of the dominant interpretiveparadigm for the bar in this period. INTRODUCTION In April of 1939, Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander, Pennsylvania's first and only black woman lawyer, began corresponding with several dozen African American women attorneys practicing law in the United States. After slightly more than a decade of practice in Phila- delphia, Alexander was on her way to a career that would place her t Assistant Professor of Law, Harvard Law School. B.S.E.E., Drexel University; J.D., Harvard Law School; M.A., Princeton University. The author would like to thank Louis C. Anthes, DavidJ. Barron, Christine A. Desan, Lani Guinier, Hendrik Hartog, Darlene Clark Hine, Lisa A. Jones, Andrew L. Kaufman, Randall L. Kennedy, Carrie Menkel-Meadow, Martha Minow, Nell Irvin Painter, Daniel T. Rodgers, and Lucie White, who read drafts of this Article and offered helpful comments, criticism, and encouragement. The analysis in this Article has also benefited from productive conversations with Vicki Schultz, John C. Coates, and Bruce L. Hay, and from the excellent research assistance of Emily Pollack and Darrell Miller. The author would like to give special thanks to the staff of the University of Pennsylvania Archives and Records Center for their assistance in making the Alexander family papers available, particularly Mark Lloyd (Director), Theresa Snyder (Associate Di- rector), andJames Curtiss Ayers (Bibliographic Assistant). All quotations from the Alexan- der family papers are courtesy of the Archives and Records Center, which retains all rights in this material. 1405 1406 CORNELL LAW REVIEW [Vol. 87:1405 among the most noteworthy women lawyers of her era. Having ob- tained her B.S. (1918), M.S. (1919), Ph.D. (economics, 1921), and J.D. (1927) from the University of Pennsylvania,1 she could already count herself as one of the most highly educated women of her time, and one of the relatively few to establish herself successfully in the private practice of law. After law school, she joined the prestigious African American law firm founded in 1923 by her husband, Raymond Pace Alexander, where she became a well-respected practitioner of probate and domestic relations law. 2 Sadie Alexander practiced there 3 until the firm's demise in 1959, after which she created her own firm. During that time the Alexander firm was Philadelphia's leading civil rights law firm-litigating desegregation cases, defending racially bi- ased criminal prosecutions, mobilizing community support for inte- gration, and lobbying legislators and public officials for changes in civil rights laws and policies.4 It was Sadie Alexander's activities outside the firm, however, that established her reputation on a national scale. She served for twenty- five years as the secretary of the National Urban League, and was elected to the national board of the ACLU. 5 In 1946, President Harry Truman appointed Alexander to his President's Committee on Civil Rights. The Committee's report, To Secure These Rights,6 was one of the most important documents of the post-World War II civil rights move- ment. In 1952, she was appointed to the Philadelphia Commission on 7 Human Relations, the city's watchdog agency on civil rights issues. After becoming its chair in 1962, she remained involved in the local and national civil rights movements, campaigning against housing dis- crimination and police brutality in the city and joining Martin Luther King, Jr. in the historic 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march.8 Alexan- der rounded out her career at the age of 81, when President Jimmy Carter appointed her to chair the White House Conference on Aging 1 See Curriculum Vitae of Sadie T.M. Alexander 1 (n.d.) (Sadie Tanner Mossell Alex- ander Papers, Box 13, on file with the University of Pennsylvania Archives and Records Center). Hereinafter, locations in the Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Papers will be des- ignated parenthetically as STMA, followed by a number that indicates the box in which the documents are stored at the University of Pennsylvania Archives and Records Center, e.g., (STMA1). 2 See Sadie T.M. Alexander, Answer to Personal Data Questionnaire of the Judicial Nominating Committee 1-2 (1964) (STMA1) [hereinafter Personal Data Questionnaire]. 3 See Curriculum Vitae of Sadie T.M. Alexander, supra note 1, at 1. 4 See infra note 342 and accompanying text. 5 See Curriculum Vitae of Sadie T.M. Alexander, supra note 1, at 2-3. 6 PRESIDENT'S COMM. ON CIVIL RIGHTS, To SECURE THESE RIGHTS: THE REPORT OF THE PRESIDENT'S COMMITTEE ON CIVIL RIGHTS (1947) [hereinafter To SECuRE THESE RIGHTS]. 7 See Curriculum Vitae of Sadie T.M. Alexander, supra note 1, at 3. 8 See id. at 2-3. 2002] GENDER, RACE, AND PROFESSIONAL POWER 1407 in 1978.9 When she passed away in 1989 at the age of ninety-one, news of her death was carried nationally.' 0 She and her husband left behind a collection of personal and professional papers that consti- tute the largest collection of black lawyers' papers in the country, which scholars are only now beginning to examine. In 1939, however, this was all still ahead of her, and Sadie Alexan- der's correspondence with her black women lawyer peers focused on more mundane issues. Alexander initiated the correspondence by sending out form letters, asking for information on black women's law practices, and initiating a fledgling professional network among wo- men who previously knew little about each other. She discovered fifty- seven African American women admitted to practice by the time she published the results of her research in 1941.11 Not surprisingly, they were clustered in the urban centers of Chicago, New York City, and Washington, D.C., where large numbers of both black and women law- yers had begun to practice, as well as scattered throughout other black population hubs in the North, Midwest and California.' 2 A few also practiced in Virginia.' 3 Alexander wrote with evident pride about the accomplishments of women who were becoming respected practition- ers, such as Jane Bolin, Yale Law School's first black woman graduate, who had established herself in private practice in Poughkeepsie and New York City before securing a position as trial counsel in the New York City Corporation Counsel's office. 14 While in private practice, Bolin succeeded where even Alexander failed, affiliating herself with a firm where her name appeared on the firm's letterhead-Mizelle & 9 C. Gerald Fraser, Sadie T.M. Alexander, 91, Dies;Lawyer and CivilRights Advocate, N.Y. TiMEs, Nov. 3, 1989, at D18. 10 For summaries of Sadie Alexander's many accomplishments, see Kenneth Walter Mack, Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander, in NOTABLE AMERICAN WOMEN 1976-2000: A Bio- GRAPHICAL DICrIONARY (Susan Ware ed., forthcoming 2002); Fraser, supra note 9; Myrna Oliver, Sadie Alexander; Pioneered Opportunitiesfor Blacks, L.A. TIMEs, Nov. 7, 1989, at A26; and Donna St. George, Lawyer Sadie Alexander, a Black Pioneer, Dies at 91, PHmA. INQUIRER, Nov. 3, 1989, at 1-A. 11 See Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander, Women as Practitionersof Law in the United States, 1 NAT'L BJ. 56, 61 (1941). The exact number of black women lawyers remains unclear. Alexander states in her article that she located fifty-seven, while the table at the end of the article lists fifty-eight, although several were recently deceased. Id. at 61-64. The 1940 census recorded thirty-nine black women lawyers in the workforce. J. CLAY SMITH, JR., Es,,ANciPATION: THE MAKING OF THE BLACK LAWYER 1844-1944, at 636-37 (1993). In 1935, Edith Spurlock Sampson, one of Alexander's contemporaries at the black women's bar, conducted her own count and discovered thirty-five black women lawyers. See Edith Spur- lock Sampson, Legal Profession Followed by Nation's Best Known Socialites, CHI.